Czech novelist Milan Kundera opens his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being with an introduction to Nietzsche’s theory of eternal return:

The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum! What does this mad myth signify?

Putting it negatively, the myth of eternal return states that a life which disappears once and for all, which does not return, is like a shadow, without weight, dead in advance, and whether it was horrible, beautiful, or sublime, its horror, sublimity, and beauty mean nothing.

This is a burden, he explains:

If every second of our lives recurs an infinite number of times, we are nailed to eternity as Jesus Christ was nailed to the cross. It is a terrifying prospect. In the world of eternal return the weight of unbearable responsibility lies heavy on every move we make. That is why Nietzsche called the idea of eternal return the heaviest of burdens (das schwerste Gewicht).

If eternal return is the heaviest of burdens, then our lives can stand out against it in all their splendid lightness.

But heaviness isn’t always worse than lightness:

[The] absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant.

And Kundera asks, perhaps setting up the main question the novel’s characters seek to answer:

What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?

Making decisions and commitments

Having children brings a burden to one’s life. One cannot easily escape the responsibility and weight of parenting.

But for me, having had children is much better than having not had them. I don’t even know what the light life without them would be like. I just know it’s not a life that I would choose, given my knowledge of my life as a mother.

I live with my 23-year-old daughter right now as she launches her career in social work. During Covid, I had all three children with me, one in the workforce, one in college, one finishing high school. My ex-husband thought that my son, already working, shouldn’t be living at home. Fortunately he and I no longer shared a home, so I could make the decision without (much) complaint to have Charlie live with me.

It’s heavy to have an adult or almost-adult child live with you.

The choice to have a child is irreversible, and it reverberates into the eternity of your life.

Heavyweight art

I’m working on my first assemblage artwork, a three-dimensional sort of sculpture made of discarded objects, old books, wood, and wire.

I’ve reached the stage of gluing and screwing elements together. Yesterday I glued the bottom stack of books together using wood glue. Once I do something like that it’s difficult if not impossible to go back.

Each step forward has weight. Each step forward defines what can and cannot happen later.

None of these steps are as weighty as the decision to have a child, of course.

Something I love about making real physical art is the weightiness of it. My art has gotten progressively heavier. First I painted on paper. Then on Michael’s Super Value canvases made of lightweight fabric stretched on bars only 3/4″ deep. I found some “gallery wrapped” canvases at Blick on sale and bought them — canvas stretched on thicker (1.5″ – 2.5″) wood pieces, with staples hidden. The sides can be finished and no frame is necessary.

Now I usually paint on 1.5″ depth gallery wrapped Michael’s Level 3 canvases. My art has gotten bigger as I’ve developed my style. For a show I’m entering today, one of the pieces is 36″ x 36″. It’s heavy, and it required a lot of paint and commitment to get it done.

Heaviness or lightness?

I imagine most people, if you asked them, would choose a light and happy life versus a heavy, burdened, and potentially more meaningful one.

But that’s exactly what Nietzsche was arguing against with his theory of eternal return.

He thought we shouldn’t wish for everything to be easy and smooth. He thought that we should affirm life in all its fullness, including the suffering, grief, and pain that goes along with joy, delight, and peacefulness.

It’s relevant to whether I choose today to actually submit images of my paintings to that show I mentioned. I feel reluctant to do so. I know there’s a good possibility I’ll be rejected, and that will feel bad. If I get a piece accepted, then I’ll want to go to the art show opening, and socialize with a lot of people I don’t already know. That is anxiety-producing. It’s heavy.

I’ve been enjoying running the options wheel for a few months now, and have managed to book regular profits, with a bit of a bobble when I overloaded on precious metals and energy stocks (again! I keep doing that and ending up a bag holder).

I seem to have — like many people — a tendency to follow euphoria. And I did that with semiconductor short puts recently. Now about 15% of my options portfolio is in $TSM, $MRVL, and $INTC. The $MRVL position is doing especially poorly, but it expires on 8/21/2026 so all I’m doing is waiting to see if I get assigned. If I do, then I’ll run the other half of the wheel — selling covered calls.

Using bear put spreads with the wheel, for downside protection

This morning, perusing an interesting thread on r/optionswheel, I came across a very interesting trading approach:

ThrockmortenMD•1d ago

I’ve gotten to where I just sell credit spreads with the long strike just being a way to amplify gains before taking assignment. Then it doesn’t really matter nearly as much. I’ll even roll the short out and reenter the long if I don’t want assignment immediately.

And they continue with more details, when someone asks “Don’t the protective puts end up eating a big chunk of your profits over time?”

I sell on portfolio margin and just add another couple spreads to make up the difference. I would rather have more protection and be slightly over leveraged than risk all the allocated cash….

[Essentially], I may sell a 5 lot on Amazon, 30 delta, 5 strikes wide. If threatened, I will sell the long position for profit to further reduce my average entry, and then I will run the wheel. I have zero problem holding AMZN shares so it is a win win. It’s a terrible strategy for high beta stocks or catching falling knives. So I would stick to mag7 and the like.

I really like this approach. I’ve dabbled a bit in credit spreads, and like the opportunity to benefit on the long put side if the underlying comes under pressure.

I’m going to consider whether I should modify my wheeling to use this approach to downside protection.

Starting off with covered calls

Another alternative to a straight options wheel is to start with what’s usually the second part of the wheel, selling covered calls:

hendronator•9h ago

Ideally, I start off owning a stock and writing cc’s. I am buying when it is down from its ath by 5-20%. And it is preferably a stock that pays dividends. And only sell the cc’s above my cost basis. Eventually it gets called away. At that point, I start writing csp’s at or below the price it get called away. If the stock drops even more, I either buy more and writing cc’s or do a csp.

I’ve been considering this right now, especially with $SPY trading around its 50-day MA, where it has often bounced before. But its IV is rather low right now (IV percentile of just 29%) so the premiums aren’t too compelling. $QQQ on the other hand has an IV rank of 70% but the chart looks much worse, because of the semiconductor stock weakness.

On trying to time a short put entry

The entire thread is about whether and how to time short put entries. In general, commenters say “don’t bother” and this makes sense in a probabilistic game of selling puts. Charts might tell you a little bit about whether a stock has run too far or fallen too much, but you’re likely better off just continuing to sell puts on tickers you like when the premiums make it worth it to you.

Here’s what one experienced wheel trader writes:

ScottishTrader•2d ago

No, opening a short put after a stock has rallied too high doesn’t make sense.

But opening on “red days” doesn’t make sense either, as this may be the start of a red week or further price erosion . . . Red days are a foolish indicator, as the price may recover or it may keep going down.

Besides, what do you do when a stock is on an upward trend? Wait until it drops to open? Think of the profits missed waiting on the sidelines . . .

Long upward trending with room to move higher, or the stock trading in a range, is a much better way to ride that trend or collect theta decay than to “time” the market, which is what waiting for a red day means.

Opening 30-45 dte is what many do to have a strike farther OTM.

Again, the most important thing is to be good with holding shares of the stock as a good quality stock will be one that behaves and doesn’t move around a lot, and if it does drop it will recover faster. Often within the 30-45 dte timeframe of a trade.

Experienced traders use fundamental analysis to trade quality stocks and simple trend analysis to choose those that “behave” rather than guessing or gambling on red days . . .

Me and the options wheel

I really love selling puts as an income generation approach. But I haven’t locked in my process yet.

Some mistakes I’ve made –

• Overloading on certain sectors in times of euphoria (precious metals & energy, then semiconductors)
• Not remaining exposed when I felt scared – thus missing out on earning premium in the places in the market where things were doing well
• Playing around with “cut your losers short” rules when I would have been better off to wait for assignment and then run the other part of the wheel (selling CCs)

But some potential problems are just the nature of the wheel. Using bear put spreads on margin could be a way to address that. I’ll consider it.

Yesterday, I drew the Judgment card in a Tarot reading, in the position Where Courage Is Needed. The Judgement card can be read as a call to adventure and, or alternatively, as a resurrection.

In Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom, Tarot interpreter Rachel Pollack writes of this card, and its “call to rise to a more meaningful existence”:

Sometimes in life a person can come to a crossroads (notice the cross in the banner) where a decision is required on whether to make some great change. And sometimes it can seem as if something within the person has already decided and the only choice left to the conscious self is to follow with the appropriate action. The old ways of believing and thinking, the old situations, have died without ourselves even noticing.

In the same reading, in the position of What to Release, I drew the Eight of Cups, a card of departure. By the light of the moon¹, a person walks away from eight upright cups towards a foreboding mountain, following a river to their left.

Of this card, Pollack writes:

In this card we see someone turning his back on a double row of standing Cups which symbolize a situation that not only has provided happiness, but actually continues to do so. In contrast to the Five, all the Cups remain upright; nothing has been knocked over. And yet the person knows that the time has come to leave….

We see the figure climbing a hill, going to higher ground, with the implication of moving from a less to a more meaningful situation.

These cards together urge me to move towards what is more meaningful. Or, perhaps, they reflect the journey I’ve already taken in that direction.

Last weekend’s artist talks

I attended the artist talks for the WCACO No Rules exhibition which closed last weekend. I connected with two artists I have admired for their work in the past, women I had never met, except by coming across their art. One woman had won a grand prize at a show I participated in. The other had her art written up in a WCACO newsletter from when I had just joined the group.

Looking up both of them online at the time I was introduced to their art, I found that they were just like me, older women who felt a call to make art, and who stuck with it long enough to develop skills and to evolve a particular style.

I am realizing that influence and inspiration doesn’t always depend upon building an audience of thousands or millions of followers online. Instead, it can happen one-on-one.

In my own life, I’m experiencing how one person’s activities can influence and inspire another’s. As I wrote before, my creative activities have inspired my older daughter to answer the call to work on her own. In another example of that, my younger daughter is working on an art piece to submit to WCACO’s (Un)Altered Books show, because she was inspired by my own work for it.

Pollack writes, of the Judgment card, that one person’s liberation is everyone’s:

By showing a whole group rising the trump reminds us that there is no personal liberation. Each human being is part of the human race and therefore responsible for the development of the race as a whole. No one can be truly free while someone else is enslaved. [We] might recall the Talmudic saying (quoted at the end of the film Schindler’s List) ‘He who saves one life, it is as if he has saved the entire world.

I think of my maternal grandmother, who inspired me to make art. She didn’t try to sell her work or show it. She didn’t do it for any other reason than that she couldn’t stop herself from creating, and also because it was a way to share with other people.

Leaving behind the things of early and middle adulthood

I read the Eight of Cups card in my reading as describing the journey I’m taking right now away from what was demanded of me in early and middle adulthood: that I create a partnership and raise children, that I form a household, that I build a career and financial security, that I orient myself towards what society wanted of me. I had that success, and I don’t need it anymore. But it’s hard to walk away from it nevertheless.

Walking instead towards meaningfulness and creative expression feels lonely sometimes, like the figure on the card. It feels like I’m walking only by the light of the moon. There’s a river burbling beside me, which makes me feel a sense of progress. There is a scary mountain ahead. It looks stark and uniniviting. Can I really live like that?

Pollack notes that the figure in the Eight of Cups resembles the Hermit, a Tarot card who follows the vita contemplativa, withdrawing from normal society to pursue wisdom and enlightenment. She writes:

To reach the height of the Hermit’s wisdom, we must first put the ordinary things of life behind us.

The Hermit reminds us that the image of land does not necessarily mean action or involvement in the ordinary sense, but an suggest almost the opposite: that is, withdrawing from outer activity to seek at greater self-awareness.

I’m not sure that following the way of the hermit is exactly what I should be doing — another card in yesterday’s reading was the Six of Wands, a card of external visibility and validation. I interpret that to mean that my current urge to apply to art shows is something to indulge, not resist.

However, the Eight of Cups says to me that my current trajectory of leaving what used to matter to me behind is as well a valid and valuable direction.

Putting these cards together, I read a message of courage, contemplation, and creativity.

I will bring courage to my willingness to live a life of contemplation, one which is more solitary than my life before. But I will also bring the courage to create, in that it might allow me to find a kind of salvation for myself while showing the way to other people around me.

1. Actually, Pollack says its an eclipse. ︎

To call what I’m doing with my options trading is “running my own capital” might be taking it too far. But I nevertheless enjoyed this X thread from ArrakisGlobal.

I’ll never see an eight figure year — and that’s ok! I don’t need it.

Some guidelines pulled from the thread:

• Make any position a trade. Turn it into an investment only if it works.
• Stay liquid so that you can get in and out of investments when you need to. I.e., don’t put a bunch of money in a gated fund if you might need that money.
• If you’re facing a big life problem, take exposure down until you solve it. “Trading flows from a clear mind.”
• Limit your use of leverage.
• Manage to a number, not to a percent. “IIts irrelevant what your % return is when managing money in an eat what you kill system.”
• Implement risk tolerance and cut quickly to avoid large drawdowns.

What about buy-and-hold for savings?

I’ve been considering whether I should manage my entire portfolio myself. I’ve been using an asset manager for my IRA, and it is doing well, but not because he is doing much with the portfolio, but rather because I have kept my hands off it.

I don’t want to trade with that part of my money — I have a longer time horizon. But I would like to save the asset management fee. And I’m not sure I’m really getting much out of that setup anymore.

Another thread I came across on X suggests that are serious risks to U.S. large caps.

Ree cites the following as reasons for caution:

• High valuations, nearing records. “High valuations don’t crash a market by themself. But current valuation equals future gravity on future returns.”
• A new, hawkish Fed chair.
• Midterm election year cycle. “Since 1974, 10 of 10 have handed the S&P a drawdown, averaging -21%.”
• Bond yields are surging. This reprices debt and changes the economics of every future project.
• While oil prices have softened, there remain supply constraints and shortages “across a range of finished projects.” This might mean a second wave of inflation.

Ree concludes here:

I like that. “Prediction is a trap, preparation is a skill.”

The best lesson I’ve learned from options trading is not to depend upon my own analysis and predictions but instead to depend upon probabilities and accepting the risk that some trades will fail.

This week, I plan to enter one art show and work on a piece for a second. I have the paintings mostly done for the first show; just need to photograph them and then submit the application.

For the second, I am doing assemblage — creating a three-dimensional sculpture out of non-traditional, everyday items. I’m taking four old books and combining them with things I found at Goodwill for WCACO’s (Un)Altered Books: Unheard Voices show.

I didn’t realize until a couple of days ago that I was doing assemblage. It’s not something I’ve done before or considered doing, just what began to emerge as I thought about a submission for the book show.

The Tate’s article on assemblage shares some interesting historical details. Pablo Picasso made three-dimensional works starting in 1912. In 1918, dada artist Kurt Schwitters scavenged scrap materials to create such works, and called the technique merz. In the 1950s and 60s, assemblage gained popularity as an artform. In a sketchbook note from 1964, Jasper Johns wrote:

Take an object / Do something to it / Do something else to it. [Repeat.]

Johns, along with Robert Rauschenberg “adopted an apparently anti-aesthetic approach to making art,” using found items and scrap materials with messy paint to create expressionist reliefs and sculptures. This earned them the name neo-dada.

In the 1960s and 70s, a radical art movement emerged in Italy, and became known as arte povera, or “poor art.” These artists used throwaway materials such as soil, rags, and twigs. The idea wasn’t making art without using money but rather “without the restraints of traditional practices and materials.”

Modern assemblage artists include Sarah Lucas, Tomoko Takahashi, and Damien Hirst.

Experimenting with assemblage

Initially I thought I would lay out my old books on a wood panel, glue them on, and then add writing and painting over them. That was just taking my traditional 2D art approach and using books to do it.

Once I had the books from eBay, I started playing around with different configurations. Stacking them appealed to me more than laying them out in a two-dimensional configuration.

I went to Goodwill to look for objects to include in the composition. At first I found nothing. I was looking for objects that gave a sense of luxury and wealth, thinking of Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina (also Constance Chatterley), who were high society, affluent women. But I didn’t find much.

Instead, I found modern objects — home decor pieces with phrases written on them — that could make my sculpture cheeky and transgressive. I spent $20 for a selection of items that I think will make a stunning and thought-provoking piece.

It’s so far from what I was originally planning! That’s how artmaking is sometimes — it goes in unexpected directions.

Here’s one experiment with putting the books and objects together. I’m thinking I’ll change what the objects with writing on them say — e.g., crossing out “trusts, hopes, perseveres, love never” from the Love Always piece, so that it says “Love Always FAILS.” I’m thinking of crossing out the YOU in “I <heart> YOU” and painting on someone else. And so forth.

I’ve chatted extensively with various AIs about how to construct the piece. I’ll be using a combination of hardware (screws and corner brackets) and glue (two-part 30-minute epoxy, picking it up today).

It’s motivating and inspiring to be doing an entirely different kind of art.

And other activities

Today, I’m attending artist talks for WCACO’s No Rules member show.

The rest of the week’s schedule is largely clear, allowing me to spend most of my time on artmaking and photographing art, around my usual daily activities of dog walking, gardening, options trading, and maintaining the house in good shape.

My older daughter is arriving Saturday from Atlanta for a stay in Colorado. It’s her birthday this week, and she’s coming in town to celebrate it with family.

The heat wave will continue. It’s forecasted to reach 100°F today, and will be in the nineties all week, then back to the hundreds for the weekend. Wow I am so tired of this! And so are the dogs, as they don’t get afternoon / evening walks when it’s so hot outside.

A couple weeks ago I shared a vision for my lifestyle that I summarized as mountain luxe artist grandma.

I’m already bringing it into reality, and figuring out the key elements:

• She is a frugal do-it-yourselfer. She’d rather figure out a home maintenance project herself than hire it out. She’d rather buy used clothes at Goodwill and help the environment while saving money than shop Nordstrom. Better yet, she relies on things she already has than shopping for new ones.
• She doesn’t spend money on beauty or worry about it much. She definitely doesn’t get Botox or have other cosmetic procedures done. Her hair is unhighlighted. She trims it herself, but not very often.
  • What about makeup? I still wear it very occasionally but maybe I’m wasting my money and time with it? In her remote mountain cabin, MG wouldn’t have much use for it.
• She “eats what she kills” financially. No, she’s not a huntress. She is a financial trader. She doesn’t have a corporate job or any online hustles. She makes income through stock, options, and futures trading.
• She is an artist, not as a hobby and not as a hustle. She is an artist so that she can express herself, physically interact with things in the world (paint, canvas, brushes), and, inspire people close to her to express themselves creatively.
• She loves to get her exercise by getting out in nature — hiking or camping or skiing. But she also goes to the gym and does strength training at home, when she can’t get outdoors for movement.
• She’s single. She’s had great love affairs in her life, but that is behind her, along with all the drama it brought.

Of all these things, the bullet point about beauty is the most notable to me right now. Am I ready to give up on makeup? I’ve already given up on haircuts and highlights. I only tried Botox and other cosmetic procedures during a brief period of my life.

It feels freeing to think of giving up makeup entirely! But sometimes I like to wear it.

Just like I’m not going to stop going to the gym just because a 100% Mountain Gma wouldn’t do it.

I listed to a bit of Tara Brach’s recent podcast episode Stories that Imprison Our Heart, Part 2, and it made me think about stories I’ve told for a long time about my life, stories that jail me, that condemn me, that punish me.

Brach always finds funny anecdotes to illustrate her talks. In this one she tells the story of when an reporter was interviewing a bank president:

The question was, “Sir what’s the secret of your success?”

He says: “Two words.”

“And sir, what are they?”

“Right decisions.”

“But how do you make right decisions?”

“One word.”

“And sir, what’s that?”

“Experience.”

“And how do you get experience?”

“Two words.”

“And wir, what’s that?”

“Wrong decisions.”

I’ve made many, many wrong decisions in my life. I’m not sure there is a way to go through life, which runs in only one direction — forward through time — and not make a lot of decisions that were wrong.

But while I find this little anecdote cute, it doesn’t actually represent how I think of seemingly wrong decisions. No, I take a more Nietzschean view of the situation. I see that a life is made up of good and bad decisions, good and bad outcomes, lessons learned and lessons ignored and lessons forgotten after good and bad decisions and good and bad outcomes.

Brach’s anecdote is too close to saying “everything is either a blessing or a lesson” — either a good thing or something to learn from. This implies that if you make a big mistake just be grateful for it because you know not to make the same mistake in the future.

What it doesn’t say is “this human life can be nonsensical, it can be tragic, it can be happy, it will have sadness. You as a human aren’t here to make the best possible decisions and constantly learn from your mistakes. You are here to live the glory and pain, and to do it, ideally in your own way, as the great character you might be in your story.”

Stories that imprison

Still, I’m going to go back to the idea of stories that imprison. I didn’t listen to Brach’s whole talk so I’m just riffing off the title of the podcast episode.

The phrase “stories that imprison” makes me think of Hester Prynne, who was imprisoned in the beginning of her story told in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter.

Far from being imprisoned by her adultery and her lifelong punishment of having to wear a scarlet letter “A” on her bodice, these events provide a foundation for her to become a great person. She becomes an admired and valued member of her community through her needlework and nursing skills. She turned shame into strength not by learning from her mistake, but by fully embracing it as part of her story.

I think of how I’ve held the story of my divorce as a story of shame, a story of wrongdoing, a story of taking a step off of the life path that I should have stayed on.

This story imprisons me.

Stories that free

At the end of The Scarlet Letter, Hester’s daughter Pearl has inherited a great sum of money from Hester’s late husband. Stories were told that Hester and Pearl had gone overseas to England to live, and Pearl had married into English aristocracy. But Hester eventually returned to Boston to live in the small cottage where she had lived out her punishment and her shame:

[There] was a more real life for Hester Prynne here in New England than in that unknown region where Pearl had found a home. Here had been her sin; here, her sorrow; and here was yet to be her penitence. She had returned, therefore, and resumed—of her own free will, for not the sternest magistrate of that iron period would have imposed it—resumed the symbol of which we have related so dark a tale. Never afterwards did it quit her bosom. But, in the lapse of the toilsome, thoughtful, and self-devoted years that made up Hester’s life, the scarlet letter ceased to be a stigma which attracted the world’s scorn and bitterness, and became a type of something to be sorrowed over, and looked upon with awe, yet with reverence too.

This sorrowing over, this awe, this sense of reverence: I think of approaching a human life with such subtle and complex perspective.

Bringing a sense of grief along with awe and reverence — that is the way to look back at a human life with its big and small mistakes, its large and not-so-large sadnesses, its happinesses too in a way that frees rather than imprisons.

From MarketWatch, AI stocks are echoing a 1990s market split:

JPMorgan strategist Jason Hunter suggests that the divergence between semiconductor equity performance and that of hyperscalers, where “AI spenders are punished and AI-spending recipients are rewarded” is concerning:

If hyperscalers struggle to get past important technical resistance levels “and come under renewed pressure for whatever reason over the near-term, while the semiconductor group is still trading below its key resistance, what started as a rotation within the AI-theme could feed into a more concerning unwind,” he told clients on Wednesday.

Lately, it’s been a stock pickers’ market, as certain names do well and others lag. Correlation across S&P 500 stock performance has fallen close to a record low.

Implied correlation estimates how much individual stocks in an index, such as the S&P 500, are expected to move together in the future. Right now, we also are seeing elevated dispersion levels — the difference between the implied volatility of the index itself and the average implied volatility of its individual components.

I’ve seen in my recent options trading that index volatility is very low, while certain stocks have high IV.

One Twitter observer says that traders may benefit from this situation, while buy-and-hold investors suffer, but it also could indicate rough seas ahead.

I suspect this will continue for the foreseeable future. While it can make for a trader’s paradise, it can have negative implications for “buy and hold” portfolios that are oblivious to movements in individual stocks not trading inline with headline indices.

Lastly, high dispersion and low implied correlations tend to occur near market turns, as we saw in 2000. While this doesn’t mean markets will roll over immediately, those paying attention to these critical factors can save themselves a lot of heartache. Hence why, and especially now, proper risk management is key!

Michael Cembalest of JPMorgan Asset Management says that in the later stages of the dotcom boom, you saw divergences in index components and sectors marking the top:

“So you had this period in the market where the front end, which were the communications-services stocks, started to flatline, but the infrastructure stocks kept going, and it was a bit of a head fake to the market,” Cembalest said.

Currently, stocks of hyperscalers at the front end of the AI boom are stagnating with falls in free cash flow, while chips, infrastructure providers and optical networking gain. “There are some parallels here that I think we need to think about because you always want the caboose going fast, slower than the front of the engine, and that’s not what’s happening,” he said.

But lately, semiconductors have dropped while hyperscalers bounced back a bit. In a truly bullish market, you’d want to see everything advancing at once.

My recent moves

I closed out a short put on $SMH (a semiconductor ETF) as semis bounced to decrease my exposure to that sector. I have exposure to the hyperscalers, but not too much, and at pretty low deltas and strike prices.

My two energy short puts closed yesterday and I didn’t choose to add on more. I expect a Trump TACO shortly, as oil prices soar after the Houthis claim they struck Saudi Arabian tankers in the Red Sea, after announcing a blockade earlier this week.

Because implied volatility of energy equities and ETFs such as $XOM, $CVX, $XLE, and $XOP should be up today it would be alright to sell puts, even at risk that oil comes back down a bit with an expected TACO.

The strategy here, for an options wheel trader such as myself, would be to identify the high volatility equities that still show good strength, and focus on those.

I am heartily enjoying D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (LCL), not because of the sex scenes (I haven’t gotten to anything too terribly explicit and not sure how much further they might go) but because of his writing style, and the engaging philosophical musings he shares.

In Chapter I, he introduces protagonist Constance Chatterley and her sister Hilda:

They had been sent to Dresden at the age of fifteen, for music among other things. And they had a good time there. They lived freely among the students, they argued with the men over philosophical, sociological, and artistic matters, they were just as good as the men themselves: only better, since they were women. And they tramped off to the forests with sturdy youths bearing guitars, twang-twang! They sang the Wandervogel songs and they were free. Free! That was the great word. Out in the open world, out in the forests, of the morning, with lusty and splendid-throated young fellows, free to do as they liked, and—above all—to say what they liked. It was the talk that mattered supremely: the impassioned interchange of talk. Love was only a minor accompaniment.

This passage is rhythmic and poetic, and uses more verbiage than it would seemingly need to, but it draws me in. He uses the onomatopeia “twang-twang!” for the guitar sounds. He uses words like “free” and “talk” more than one time to make his point.

And he evern circles back around later to these two ideas, the idea of freedom and the idea of talking:

So they had given the gift of themselves, each to the youth with whom she had the most subtle and intimate arguments. The arguments, the discussions were the great thing: the love-making and connection were only a sort of primitive reversion and a bit of an anticlimax. One was less in love with the boy afterwards, and a little inclined to hate him, as if he had trespassed on one’s privacy and inner freedom. For, of course, being a girl, one’s whole dignity and meaning in life consisted in the achievement of an absolute, a perfect, a pure and noble freedom. What else did a girl’s life mean? To shake off the old and sordid connections and subjections.

And then he wraps this discussion up:

Both sisters had had their love experience by the time the war came, and they were hurried home. Neither was ever in love with a young man unless he and she were verbally very near: that is unless they were profoundly interested, TALKING to one another.

This captures my own experience of being an adolescent girl in love: the talk was the thing, and the physical intimacy secondary (though I eagerly sought it out). And it also captures my experience of a second adolescence in my forties when I sought out both talk and freedom, and only as a very far third priority, sex.

Lawrence’s writing style has been criticized, as in D.H. Lawrence, Our Contemporary by Barry Gewen, which responds to an (apparently no longer available) post by David Kelly which calls Lawrence’s book Women in Love overrated.

Gewen writes in support of the book, but acknowledges some issues with Lawrence’s style:

Any defense, however, has to begin by acknowledging the case for the prosecution. There are sentences in the novel of such awfulness that they would seem to disqualify their author from ever being considered major. When Lawrence writes of the physical in particular, he and his words can come clattering down the stairs: “The electricity was turgid and voluptuously rich, in his limbs”; “She seemed to touch the quick of the mystery of darkness that was bodily him.”

Sometimes his syntactical rhythms are so idiosyncratic, so bizarre, as to exist beyond good and evil: “The first to run across the lawn was the little Italian, small and like a cat, her white legs twinkling as she went, ducking slightly her head, that was tied in a gold silk kerchief.” Little wonder that Anthony Burgess, in his book on Lawrence, said, “No potential writer would ever take Lawrence as a model.”

I’m not sure it’s true no potential writer would ever take Lawrence as a model; I find Lawrence’s writing far more to my taste and more likely what I would want to write, were I to write fiction, than, say, Tolstoy. But maybe I need to go back and re-read Tolstoy, who is widely respected for his style. Tolstoy writes with clarity and straightforwardness, or so people say. His novels are epic in scope and bring “a keen observation of detail, with a profound moral and philosophical depth, presented through a style that is both accessible and artistically sophisticated.”

I find myself once again regretting that in my youth, when I had so much opportunity to study great literature, I focused on more prosaic subjects: economics, philosophy, statistics.

Perhaps part of what I find so compelling in Lawrence’s writing is that he was tackling very modern subjects.

Gewen writes:

Lawrence is often considered an early apostle of the sexual revolution and that is not wrong — he advocated and practiced an honesty about sex that still needs to be heard in the F.C.C., the United States customs service and other American bastions of moral guardianship. But he also was among the first to see where the sexual revolution had gone wrong. The end of repression had not produced happiness. Relations between men and women were in a sad, distrustful state. “Love” was a word of uncertain meaning and ready abuse. The institution of marriage was so wobbly that it was easy to foresee the day when rich, powerful men who seemed to have it all would be seeking out prostitutes and young interns for satisfactions they couldn’t get at home. “Women in Love” opens with the two sisters, Ursula and Gudrun, conversing. Gudrun asks Ursula, “you don’t think one needs the experience of having been married?,” and Ursula replies, “Not really. More likely to be the end of experience.”

Lawrence understood that the traditional justifications for marriage had collapsed, and with them the traditional place of sex in people’s lives.

Reading Lawrence, and reading about Lawrence makes me realize how similar the 1920s were to modern times. There was a questioning of the social order, and there was war and its aftermath (and war coming in the future too).

As I continue reading LCL I will be on the lookout for overwrought prose and bizarre syntactical rhythms. But I’m sure I will continue enjoying the experience as I have so far.

Unable to find a miniseries or film version that seems to be accurate enough for my needs, I’ve started reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover (henceforth, LCL) by D.H. Lawrence. Maybe reading rather than watching is for the best anyway so I can experience the obscenity for myself (It was banned for obscenity in the U.K. until 1960, and also in the U.S., Canada, Australia, India, and Japan).

Why was it banned? Because it depicts in great detail (or so I hear) a physical and emotional affair between a married upper-class woman, Constance Chatterley, and a working-class man, Oliver Mellors. It allegedly has explicit descriptions of sex and, I can confirm after reading a few chapters, uses profane words such as f*ck.

I did already come across a somewhat explicit sex scene and I found it at the same time tame and inspiring. But that’s not what I’m going to write about today.

Early on in the book, Lawrence declares what seems to be a theme that will be further developed (or so I’m thinking, based on what I know of the plot):

For, of course, being a girl, one’s whole dignity and meaning in life consisted in the achievement of an absolute, a perfect, a pure and noble freedom. What else did a girl’s life mean? To shake off the old and sorded connections and subjections.

But we know, from any description of the plot, that Connie marries a man who is gravely wounded in the Great War (World War I) so that he is paralyzed from the waist down. And this is, eventually, the cause of a lack of freedom.

Even before the injury, Clifford was little interested in or inspiring during sexual relations:

Clifford married Connie… and had his month’s honeymoon with her. It was the terrible year 1917, and they were intimate as two people who stand together on a sinking ship. He had been virgin when he married: and the sex part did not mean much to him. They were so close, he and she, apart from that. And Connie exulted a little in this intimacy which was beyond sex, and beyond a man’s “satisfaction.” Clifford anyhow was not just keen on his “satisfaction,” as so many men seemed to be. No, the intimacy was deeper, more personal than that. And sex was merely an accident, or an adjunct: one of the curious obsolete, organic processes which persisted in its own clumsiness, but was not really necessary.

So, while Lawrence gave Clifford a built-in excuse to refuse or limit sexual contact with Connie — it seems he wasn’t that into it anyway.

Connie helped Clifford with the stories he had published in “the most modern magazines:”

Connie helped him as much as she could. At first she was thrilled. He talked every thing over with her monotonously, insistently, persistently, and she had to respond with all her might. It was as if her whole soul and body and sex had to rouse up and pass into these stories of his. This thrilled her and absorbed her.

But they were missing an important connection with one another, the physical and sexual. Connie’s father says to her one day, “I hope, Connie, you won’t let circumstances force you into being a demi-vierge.” And later, he says the same to Clifford, “I’m afraid it doesn’t quite suit Connie to be a demi-vierge.”

“A half-virgin!” replies Clifford, and gets offended.

The story continues:

[Clifford] wanted to say something later to Connie about the demi-vierge business…the half-virgin state of her affairs. But he could not bring himself to do it. He was at once too intimate with her and not intimate enough. He was so very much at one with her, in his mind and hers, but bodily they were non-existent to one another, and neither could bear to drag in the corpus delicti. They were so intimate, and utterly out of touch.

My own experience in marriage was similar, that there were certain areas of intimacy, and certain areas of out-of-touchness. We ask marriage to provide so many different kinds of connection. And this can set up the conditions for infidelity, both in fiction, and in real life.